A documentation on the development and reception of Daniel Buren's monumental in situ work in the gardens of the Sacred Heart Church of Casablanca.
For the “Heritage and Contemporary Art, Another Story” event set up by the Institut Français of Morocco and scheduled as part of the 2015 France-Morocco Cultural Season, Daniel Buren is presenting a work in the gardens of the Sacred Heart Church of Casablanca, resonating the Casablanca Heritage Days organized by Casamémoire. As inspiration Buren chose to work on a double colonnade which had been moved to this garden in 1916 and was part of Dar El-Beyda (translation of The White House—or Casa blanca) located on the seaside at the old Anfa site. Daniel Buren therefore establishes a past/present dialogue conveyed through a type of timeless monument. This book presents this project “D'une arche aux autres. Travail in situ, Casablanca”, from the very first sketch up to final visitor acceptance. In her text Nadine Descendre discusses Daniel Buren's unfolding progression, reexamining the concepts underlying his work, and thus positioning the Casablanca project within his entire body of work.
Co-founder of the BMTP group, Daniel Buren (born 1939 in Boulogne-Billancourt, France) is a major figure on the international art scene. He made a name for himself on the art scene in the 1960s.
In 1965, Daniel Buren settled into an approach based on a striped canvas with alternating white and coloured, 8,7 cm‑wide stripes. The introduction in late 1967 of what he called a "visual tool" laid the foundations for a practice that broke with tradition and opened up a multifaceted body of work in which freedom was born, as the artist likes to point out, out of both internal and external constraints. Daniel Buren explored this "visual tool" by developing it on a flat surface and, from the end of the 1960s, in three dimensions.
